Of course, I'm biased toward my home country of the USA, and Mr. Don's country, Canada. But I have individual player favorites, too, and they're from all over the place!

I'm not sure I counted exactly right, but it appears that 131 countries this year are sending women's team to the Olympiad, and 162 men's teams. In this day and age, so sad and shame on you, countries, for shorting female chess players their chance to play on an international stage! It isn't necessarily poor countries, either, that are not fielding a team of female chess players. You can see for yourself from the list of registered countries which ones are not fielding a female team. I think it speaks for itself.

I don't believe for a second that the so-called Communists in charge of the Chinese government have not attempted to and possibly already succeeded in tunnelling underground to reach the tomb of China's first Han Dynasty emperor. When those very same "leaders" start dying off of old age or poisoning en masse we'll see what mysterious Han Dynasty artefacts heretofore not documented in any legitimate collection come up for auction. But, of course, there is always the undergound route, artefacts changing hands from billionaire "princeling" to billionaire that will never the light of public day.
Count on it, darlings. Sadly.

Buried deep under a hill in central China, surrounded by an underground moat of poisonous mercury, lies an entombed emperor who's been undisturbed for more than two millennia.

The tomb holds the secrets of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who died on Sept. 10, 210 B.C., after conquering six warring states to create the first unified nation of China.

The answers to a number of historical mysteries may lie buried inside that tomb, but whether modern people will ever see inside this mausoleum depends not just on the Chinese government, but on science.

"The big hill, where the emperor is buried — nobody's been in there," said archaeologist Kristin Romey, curatorial consultant for the Terracotta Warrior exhibition at New York City’s Discovery Times Square. "Partly it's out of respect for the elders, but they also realize that nobody in the world right now has the technology to properly go in and excavate it."

The Terracotta Warrior exhibition, featuring artifacts from the Qin dynasty and nine life-size statues from the extended burial complex built for Qin Shi Huang, is on display through Aug. 26.

The warring states
Qin Shi Huang (pronounced "chin shuh hwang") was born in 259 B.C., first son to the king of Qin, one of six independent kingdoms inside modern China. These kingdoms had been warring for more than 200 years, but through a combination of military strength, strategy and natural disasters, Qin Shi Huang conquered them all, proclaiming himself not just a king, but also an emperor — the first of China.

Scholars still debate the details of how this occurred, and what unique tactics allowed the Qin emperor to achieve what no one had managed before.

When he died, Qin Shi Huang was buried in the most opulent tomb complex ever constructed in China, a sprawling, city-size collection of underground caverns containing everything the emperor would need for the afterlife. The ancient Chinese, along with many cultures including ancient Egyptians, believed that items and even people buried with a person could be taken with him to the afterlife.

But instead of burying his armies, concubines, administrators and servants with him, the Qin emperor came up with an alternative: clay reproductions.

Shocking discovery
In 1974, a group of farmers digging wells near Xi'an, China stumbled upon one of the most shocking archaeological discoveries of all time. The life-size terracotta solider they dug out of the ground turned out to be just one of an army of thousands, each utterly unique, with individual clothing, hair and facial features.

For almost four decades, archaeologists have been excavating the site. So far, they've uncovered about 2,000 clay soldiers, but experts estimate there are more than 8,000 in total.

"They're going to be digging there for centuries," Romey predicted.

Still, scientists have yet to touch the central tomb, which holds a palace containing the body of Qin Shi Huang.

"It's really smart what the Chinese government is doing," Romey told LiveScience. "When we went into [Egyptian King] Tut's tomb, think about all the information we lost just based on the excavation techniques of the 1930s. There's so much additional that we could have learned, but the techniques back then weren’t what we have now."

"Even though we may think we have great archaeological excavation techniques right now," she said, "who knows, a century down the road if we open this tomb, what they're going to say?"

To open the tomb?
The decision whether to explore the tomb anytime soon, or ever, is up to the government of China. That decision will likely be influenced by the pace of technological progress.

"In archaeological conservation, every year you have major new developments," Romey said. "When we began excavating [the soldiers] in the '70s, the minute they were exposed to air and sunlight, the pigment just flaked off. Now they’ve figured out a new technique where they can actually preserve the paint as they excavate."

Perhaps, if science advances enough, that excavation wouldn't cause serious damage to the burial site, and the tomb will finally be opened.

"I wouldn’t be surprised if you had some sort of robotic visual survey going in there at some point," Romey said.

And despite their desire to protect the treasures of antiquity, archaeologists are itching with curiosity to find out what's inside Qin Shi Huang's central tomb.

Rivers of mercury
Ancient writings say the emperor created an entire underground kingdom and palace, complete with a ceiling mimicking the night sky, set with pearls as stars. Pits full of terracotta concubines have never been discovered, though experts predict they exist somewhere in the complex.

And Qin Shi Huang's tomb is also thought to be encircled with rivers of liquid mercury, which the ancient Chinese believed could bestow immortality.

"It's kind of ironic," Romey said. "This is probably how he died, by ingesting mercury. He was taking all these mercury pills because he wanted to live forever and it killed him by the age of 39."

That moat of mercury also presents another reason why archaeologists are loath to explore the tomb just yet — doing so would likely be very dangerous, according to soil samples around the tomb, which indicate extremely high levels of mercury contamination.

In the end, scientists and historians must always weigh their desire to know more with the damage such inquiry would cause.

"Archaeology, ultimately, is a destructive science," Romey said. "You have to destroy stuff in order to learn about it." [Really? REALLY? Back in Woolley's day, maybe. Because they were all about treasure hunting. They didn't give a shit about the culture or the context. They wanted gold, and jewels, and precious stones and wonderful still-intact artefacts. But not today. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it! Of course, you do have the option of continuing to drink the koolaide... Is it just me, or did anyone else happpen to notice how cloe this person's name is to Romney. Who, exactly, is funding her job right now, by the way?]

The title of this post is thanks to David Bowie. No truer words were ever spoken than what he wrote in that song.

Well, there is no easy way to say this, so I'll just come right out with it. The Goddesschess website that has been online since 1999 is now retired.

Time and unforeseen circumstance has, alas, forced us into this sad and painful decision. We have given so much of ourselves and our lives the past 13 plus years to building the Goddesschess website -- it is very difficult to bid all of those efforts adieu.

That is not to say the Goddesschess website we all knew and love is entirely gone -- the Wayback Machine has a version of Goddesschess from April, 2011. I have not tested it thoroughly but I assume that internal links will still work and active links to outside sources will continue to work as long as those sources are on the internet. I can but say to you - try it out and see.

Many of the things that Goddesschess did and made available to readers when we first debuted online on May 6, 1999 are now readily available elsewhere on the internet. Back in the day, they were not! So, the internet has finally caught up with what made Goddesschess so wonderful and unique. The fact that we were pioneers and did it first (and, I think, best!) will not change.

This blog will continue as long as health and time permit. I hope Don McLean will join me here -- it is, after all, a blog that was created back in 2007 as an adjunct to Goddesschess and it was a team idea, meant to be a team project. Or, perhaps he will create his very own blog, in which case I will make sure to harrass the hell out of him as much as possible. I've been encouraging him to explore that option. LOL! If he does, I'll let you know -- or he will, as he is a joint admin here and can post at will. And I'll be a nice woman (for a change) and not delete anything he chooses to post here. Delete Wars? Oh my!

This blog has now assumed the name of GODDESSCHESS and will hence be known!

Goddesschess will continue to promote the exploration of the origins of chess and other ancient board games, and all subjects that may (even remotely) be connected thereto. We will continue in whatever ways we can the promotion of female chessplayers and chess femme chess events, because females bring a particularly unique perspective to chess (and other board games), even when they do not think they do. We will continue our promotional funding of events that bring to the fore female chessplayers and award female chess players for their hard work and endeavors. If we can think up new ways to do this, we will.

Friday, August 17, 2012

ScienceDaily (Aug. 14, 2012) — A three-year study into a set of manuscripts compiled and written by one of Britain's earliest feminist figures has revealed new insights into how women challenged male authority in the 17th century.

Dr Jessica Malay has painstakingly transcribed Lady Anne Clifford's 600,000-word Great Books of Record, which documents the trials and triumphs of the female aristocrat's family dynasty over six centuries and her bitter battle to inherit castles and villages across northern England.

Lady Anne, who lived from 1590 to 1676, was, in her childhood, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Her father died when she was 15 but contrary to an agreement that stretched back to the time of Edward II -- that the Clifford's vast estates in Cumbria and Yorkshire should pass to the eldest heir whether male or female ­- the lands were handed over to her uncle.

Following an epic legal struggle in which she defied her father, both her husbands, King James I and Oliver Cromwell, Lady Anne finally took possession of the estates [at age 53], which included the five castles of Skipton, where she was born, Brougham, Brough, Pendragon and Appleby.

Malay, a Reader in English Literature at the University of Huddersfield, is set to publish a new, complete edition of Lady Anne's Great Books of Record, which contains rich narrative evidence of how women circumvented male authority in order to participate more fully in society.

Malay said: "Lady Anne's Great Books of Record challenge the notion that women in the 16th and 17th centuries lacked any power or control over their own lives.

"There is this misplaced idea that the feminist movement is predominantly a 1960s invention but debates and campaigns over women's rights and equality stretch back to the Middle Ages."

The Great Books of Record comprise three volumes, the last of which came up for auction in 2003. The Cumbria Archives bought the third set and now house all three. In 2010, Malay secured a £158,000 grant from the Leverhulme Trust to study the texts.

Malay said: "Virginia Woolf argued that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts during the Renaissance Period would have been denied the opportunity to develop her talents due to the social barriers restricting women.

"But Lady Anne is regarded as a literary figure in her own right and when I started studying the Great Books of Record I realised there is a lot more to her writing than we were led to believe. I was struck by how much they revealed about the role of women, the importance of family networks and the interaction between lords and tenants over 500 years of social and political life in Britain."

In her Great Books of Record, Lady Anne presents the case for women to be accepted as inheritors of wealth, by drawing on both documentary evidence and biographies of her female ancestors to reveal that the Clifford lands of the North were brought to them through marriage.

She argued that since many men in the 16th and 17th centuries had inherited their titles of honour from their mothers or grandmothers, it was only right that titles of honour could be passed down to female heirs.

She also contended that women were well suited to the title of Baron since a key duty of office was to provide counsel in Parliament, where women were not allowed. While men were better at fighting wars, women excelled in giving measured advice, she wrote.

Malay said: "Lady Anne appropriates historical texts, arranging and intervening in these in such a way as to prove her inevitable and just rights as heir.

"Her foregrounding of the key contributions of the female to the success of the Clifford dynasty work to support both her own claims to the lands of her inheritance and her decision to resist cultural imperatives that demanded female subservience to male authority.

"Elizabeth I was a strong role model for Lady Anne in her youth. While she was monarch, women had a level of access to the royal court that men could only dream of, which spawned a new sense of confidence among aristocratic women."

Malay's research into the Great Books of Record, which contain material from the early 12th century to the early 18th century, reveals the importance of family alliances in forming influential political networks.
It shows that women were integral to the construction of these networks, both regionally and n
ationally.

Malay said: "The Great Books explain the legal avenues open to women. Married women could call on male friends to act on their behalf. As part of marriage settlements many women had trusts set up to allow them access to their own money which they could in turn use in a variety of business enterprises or to help develop a wide network of social contacts.

"Men would often rely on their wives to access wider familial networks, leading to wives gaining higher prestige in the family."

Lady Anne was married twice and widowed twice. After her second husband died she moved back to the North and, as hereditary High Sherriff of Westmorland, set about restoring dilapidated castles, almshouses and churches.

Malay said: "Widows enjoyed the same legal rights as men. While the husband was alive then the wife would require his permission to do anything. Widows were free to act on their own without any male guardianship."

The Great Books also provide a valuable insight into Medieval and Renaissance society, with one document describing a six-year-old girl from the Clifford family being carried to the chapel at Skipton on her wedding day.

Lady Anne also recounted her father's voyages to the Caribbean and she kept a diary of her own life, which includes summaries of each year from her birth until her death at the age of 86 in 1676. Malay said: "The books are full of all sorts of life over 600 years, which is what is so exciting about them."

Malay's Anne Clifford Project, the Great Books of Record was the catalyst for an exhibition of the Great Books of Record, which are, for the first time, being exhibited in public alongside The Great Picture at the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal.

The Great Picture is a huge (so huge a window of the gallery had to be removed to accommodate its arrival) triptych that marks Lady Anne's succession to her inheritance.

The left panel depicts Lady Anne at 15, when she was disinherited. The right panel shows Lady Anne in middle age when she finally regained the Clifford estates. The central panel depicts Lady Anne's parents with her older brothers shortly after Lady Anne had been conceived.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Is this a case of follow the money? Or follow the academic reputation(s) at stake? Will the 19th century line of reasoning about where we came from and how we got here take over the top once again? Or will the 21st century view propelled by new technologies and new views ultimately prevail?

Similarities between the DNA of
modern people and Neanderthals are more likely to have arisen from shared
ancestry than interbreeding, a study reports.

That is according to research carried out at the University of Cambridge and
published this
week in PNAS journal.
Previously, it had been suggested that shared parts of the genomes of these
two populations were the result of interbreeding.
However, the newly published research proposes a different explanation.
The origin of modern humans is a hotly debated topic; four main theories have
arisen to describe the evolution of Homo sapiens.
All argue for an African origin, but an important distinction in these
competing theories is whether or not interbreeding - or "hybridisation" -
occurred between Homo sapiens and other members of the genus
Homo.
In the current study, Cambridge evolutionary biologists Dr Anders Eriksson
and Dr Andrea Manica used computer simulations to reassess the strength of
evidence supporting hybridisation events.
They argue that the amount of DNA shared between modern Eurasian humans and
Neanderthals - estimated at between 1-4% - can be explained if both arose from a
geographically isolated population, most likely in North Africa, which shared a
common ancestor around 300-350 thousand years ago.
When modern humans expanded out of Africa, around 60-70,000 years ago, they
took that genetic similarity with them.
By contrast, previous ancient
DNA studies of Neanderthal remains have shown that their genomes harbour
genetic signatures - polymorphisms - that are also seen in the genomes of modern
Europeans, East Asians and Oceanians (from Papua New Guinea) but not in modern
African populations.
The findings challenged previously held views - based on several lines of
evidence - that modern humans had replaced the Neanderthals with little or no
gene flow occurring between the two groups.

The observations from the Neanderthal genome led some evolutionary biologists
to argue that this genetic similarity had arisen through hybridisation between
Neanderthals - already resident in Europe and western Asia - and the ancestors
of present-day non-Africans.
Prof David Reich, from Harvard University in Cambridge, US - an exponent of
the hybridisation theory - is not convinced that the data represents a powerful
argument against interbreeding.
By using methods that are able to differentiate between genetic similarity
caused by gene flow via hybridisation vs shared ancestry, he argues that "the
patterns observed [in our analyses] are exactly what one would expect from
recent gene flow" - a view shared by his collaborator Professor Svante Paabo
from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,
Germany.
Prof Reich went on to say that their data shows that Neanderthals and
non-Africans last exchanged genetic
material 47-65,000 years ago.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Not sure how the prizes were divied up in the Zonal where all the guys played -- there were four players each of
whom finished with 6.0. Also, I do not know who is who, except for Bator Sambuev, whom I recognize from
his playing in the City of Montreal Championships.

Our Commitment to Chess

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2012 Goddesschess Canadian Women's Closed Chess Championship

2014 SPONSORSHIPS

Hales Corners Chess Challenge XIXApril 12, 2014Milwaukee, WIPrizes for female players in Open and Reserve sections and paid entry to next HCCC for top female finisher in each section. This is Goddesschess' 12th HCCC!

Goddesschess Fighting Spirit Award

2013 U.S. Women's Chess Championship

2013 SPONSORSHIPS

Hales Corners Chess Challenge XVIIIOctober 12, 2013Milwaukee, WIRecord prize money awarded to chess femmes - $800!In honor of National Chess Day and the one year anniversary of the passing of our webmaster, researcher and writer, Don McLean, additional prizes of $150 were awarded to the top two male finishers in each Section.Milwaukee Summer Challenge IIJune 15 - 16, 2013Milwaukee, WIPrizes for the chess femmes and funding a best game prize

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About Me

I'm one of the founders of Goddesschess, which went online May 6, 1999. I earned an under-graduate degree in history and economics going to college part-time nights, weekends and summer school while working full-time, and went on to earn a post-graduate degree (J.D.) I love the challenge of research, and spend my spare time reading and writing about my favorite subjects, travelling and working in my gardens. My family and my friends are most important in my life. For the second half of my life, I'm focusing on "doable" things to help local chess initiatives, starting in my own home town. And I'm experiencing a sort of personal "Renaissance" that is leaving me rather breathless...